Author Archives: Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation

Tax Avoidance and Geographic Earnings Disclosure

Multinational firms can avoid taxes through structured transactions among different jurisdictions (e.g., Rego 2003), such as reallocating taxable income from high-tax jurisdictions to low-tax ones (Collins et al. 1998). This type of income shifting significantly reduces tax revenues of governments in high-tax jurisdictions and potentially hinders domestic economic growth and other social benefits (e.g., GAO […]

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2013 Proxy Season Review

Corporate America’s “proxy season” has now wrapped up: most of America’s large publicly traded companies hold annual meetings to vote on business, including shareholder proposals, between April 15 and the end of June. Among the 250 largest U.S. public companies by revenues that constitute the Manhattan Institute’s Proxy Monitor database, 214 had held meetings by […]

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Renewed Focus on “Unbundling”

The recent decision by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in Greenlight Capital LP v. Apple Inc. [1] serves as a good reminder of the importance of ensuring that management proposals do not run afoul of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (“SEC”) unbundling rules. Impermissible “bundling” of management proposals, as […]

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2013 Mid-Year Securities Litigation Update

Filing and Settlement Trends Filing and settlement trends continue to reflect “business as usual” for the plaintiffs’ bar—hundreds of suits and significant settlement values can be expected for the rest of 2013, based on results from the early half of the year. According to a recent study by NERA Economic Consulting, the annualized rate of […]

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Investor Organizations Oppose Tightening of Canadian Disclosure Regime

The Managed Funds Association (“MFA”) and the Alternative Investment Management Association (“AIMA”) and have jointly submitted a comment letter with the Canadian Securities Administrators with respect to proposed changes to Canada’s block shareholder reporting regimes known in Canada as the Early Warning Reporting (“EWR”) system and the Alternative Monthly Reporting (“AMR”) system. The EWR and […]

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Golden Parachute Compensation Practice Pointers

For a variety of practical and legal reasons, compensation to be paid in connection with the sale of a public company (which this article will refer to as “golden parachute compensation”) is best addressed well before an M&A transaction is being contemplated. There are a multitude of issues that are raised when designing these sorts […]

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District Court Upholds SEC Conflict Minerals Rule

On July 23, 2013, the District Court for the District of Columbia upheld Rule 13p-1 under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the “Exchange Act“), which was promulgated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) pursuant to Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Rule 13p-1 requires […]

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Strengthening Oversight of Broker-Dealers to Prevent Another Madoff

The facts surrounding Bernie Madoff’s unprecedented fraud are well-known. Through a Ponzi scheme, he stole untold billions over decades. What is not as well-appreciated is that during the vast majority of this time, he operated solely as a registered broker-dealer. This led to the inevitable conclusion that the regulatory framework for broker-dealer custody required urgent […]

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Sustainability Disclosure in Annual Reports and Proxy Statements

Public interest groups and socially responsive investors have been for decades pushing for increased sustainability (also known as environmental, social, and governance or ESG) disclosure by public companies. Surprisingly, many mainstream investors (in the United States and worldwide) are now joining the call for better and more uniform sustainability disclosure, arguing that such disclosure is […]

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NYSE Eliminates 50% Quorum Requirement

On July 11, 2013, the Securities and Exchange Commission published a proposal by the New York Stock Exchange to amend Section 312.07 of the Listed Company Manual, which became effective immediately. Section 312.07 has been revised to remove the requirement that the total votes cast on proposals requiring shareholder approval under the NYSE rules must […]

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